Description: Spanish police arrested six individuals allegedly behind a €19M ($20.9M) global investment scam powered by AI. The operation used deepfake ads featuring national celebrities to deceive victims, many of whom were selected through targeting algorithms. Scammers posed as financial advisors and fake officials, cycling through romance baiting, investment fraud, and recovery scams. AI-generated content amplified trust and engagement.
Editor Notes: The incident date of 04/07/2025 is taken from the date of the arrests. The scams had been ongoing for at least two years, according to reports.
Entities
View all entitiesAlleged: Unknown deepfake technology developers and Unknown generative AI developers developed an AI system deployed by Unnamed criminal group in Spain and Individuals arrested in Granada and Alicante, which harmed General public , General public of Spain , Global victims targeted by scams and Individuals who lost money through scam investment platforms.
Alleged implicated AI systems: AI-generated deepfake video systems , Algorithmic targeting tools , Fake investment platforms , Identity spoofing and impersonation tools and Unknown deepfake apps
Incident Stats
Incident ID
1017
Report Count
2
Incident Date
2025-04-07
Editors
Daniel Atherton
Incident Reports
Reports Timeline
Spain's police arrested six individuals behind a large-scale cryptocurrency investment scam that used AI tools to generate deepfake ads featuring popular public figures to lure people.
The scam was very successful, defrauding 19 million Eur…
- "Regular" clones are so 2023: With AI-generated passports, deepfakes and websites, fraudsters are running sophisticated, large-scale, ultra-realistic scams.
- "It's a speed game", said Exante's Head of Compliance, "You need AI tools to copy …
Variants
A "variant" is an incident that shares the same causative factors, produces similar harms, and involves the same intelligent systems as a known AI incident. Rather than index variants as entirely separate incidents, we list variations of incidents under the first similar incident submitted to the database. Unlike other submission types to the incident database, variants are not required to have reporting in evidence external to the Incident Database. Learn more from the research paper.
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